


Tengwar

by ninemoons42



Category: Inception (2010), Lord of the Rings (2001 2002 2003)
Genre: Charity Auctions, Community: help_japan, Love Bites, M/M, Shower Sex, Tattoos, Writing on Skin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-20
Updated: 2011-04-20
Packaged: 2017-10-18 10:22:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames gives Arthur an Idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tengwar

  
title: Tengwar  
author: [](http://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=ilovetakahana)[**ninemoons42**](http://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=ninemoons42)  
pairing: Arthur/Eames  
warnings: Introspection! Arthur leaving teeth marks in Eames! Abuse of Sindarin and tengwar! Hidden depths and secret tats! Shower sexytimes!  
This is my fic for [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/soy_latte/profile)[**soy_latte**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/soy_latte/) , who won me in Round One of the auctions at [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/help_japan/profile)[**help_japan**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/help_japan/). I got a series of prompts from her after the auction, and I've taken off from this one: "After waking up from being under (for a job, or test run) Arthur finds little messages written on his skin once back at his hotel. On his wrist, his collar bone, etc. It happens more than once."  
Thanks so much to the Twitter peeps for being so encouraging to the ideas of this fic, and especially for the quick Britpicking from [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/laria_gwyn/profile)[**laria_gwyn**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/laria_gwyn/) and [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/deepsix/profile)[**deepsix**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/deepsix/).  
disclaimer: I don't own the original story or the characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.  
summary: Eames gives Arthur an Idea.

  
When Arthur wakes up, he is alone.

He opens his eyes to a trompe-l’œil ceiling and the dancing, shifting glitter of sunlight rippling off the waters of Venice.

The bed smells like sweat and wine, like musk and oranges. Soap, skin, and dark chocolates.

He treats himself to a long, lazy stretch and he feels the muscles in his body pop and stretch and burn, long lines from his shoulders to his feet. He’s still pleasantly sore in a few places, and it makes him smile, and cover his mouth, though there’s no one in the room to see.

On his side of the bed the side table features a single, perfect blue rose in fragile Murano glass. Scattered at its base: his Glock 17 in its holster, two extended magazines, his wallet, his pocketknife. A small mirror.

Arthur reaches out for the mirror and angles it to look down his body. It takes him a few moments to find the message that he was expecting; it’s on his collarbone.

 _A tíro nin, Fanuilos!_

Arthur still doesn’t know much about fictional languages, preferring to focus more on things that he can actually use in his work – but he knows this sentence by heart, knows the sweeping curves and precise points of the tengwar like he knows the lines in the palms of his hands.

“O look towards me, Everwhite!”

He traces carefully over the characters, watching the movements of his fingers in the mirror.

Somewhere in Arthur’s baggage is a handful of moleskine notebooks, the contents of which he encodes in a fairly complex mathematical cipher. Several of the notebooks contain his references and research from job to job, and at least one of them serves as his own personal Yellow Pages for people in the dreamshare.

But the most important notebook is the one he always places at the top of the stack.

Several pages on that notebook carry the cut-up pieces of a postcard. A careful reconstruction will reveal a Barcelona postmark, the ink already fading; one of Arthur’s dummy addresses in the United States; and the lines that identify the picture on the front, one of the entrances to the Parc Güell.

The rest of the postcard is almost completely taken up by the following lines:

 _Renich i lú i erui govannem?  
Nauthannen i ned ôl reniannen._

Arthur knows the translation by heart, now, but he remembers how he felt, wondering what Eames had been doing in Barcelona, and feeling confused about the relevance of the lines.

The lines are from the movie trilogy, spoken in a dream-conversation between Aragorn and Arwen.

“Do you remember when we first met?”  
“I thought I had strayed into a dream.”

 _Layers of meanings, dreams within dreams,_ Arthur thinks, and he smiles as he pulls the covers back over his head. If he concentrates, if he breathes in deeply, he can smell Eames in the pillows.

Eames: like seawater and lemon, like curry and leather gloves, like the harshly metallic grit of gunshot residue. Like blood on the tongue, like sandburn and winter winds.

The Barcelona postcard is one of many messages. One of the pages has one of Eames’s ID photos on it, and next to it is Arthur’s own rendition of the words crammed onto the back of the 2 x 2 square:

 _Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,  
mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað._

“Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder,  
spirit the greater as our strength lessens.”

 _Translation,_ Arthur thinks, _don’t worry about me._ Pause, and a fond snort. _As if he could stop me, since he can’t even stop himself when our roles are reversed._

And the funny thing is that he figured out the passion for languages first, before he’d ever realized that he was the only other person Eames kept in such regular contact with.

///

“Eames?”

“Arthur.”

“What is it with you and _The Lord of the Rings_? Is it some kind of wish to be an elf?”

Eames chuckled. “Do you know what my degree was in?”

“Liberal Arts,” Arthur said, with a straight face.

“How American. I completed a degree in European languages, second class honours. One of my tutors got me interested in Tolkien’s grammar and vocabulary, language-building, particularly in the evolution of Sindarin vs. Quenya. It’s not precisely the same as our little Ariadne’s work, but I imagine there may be some similiarities. I’m not sure the term 'scholar' applies to me, considering I’m not exactly published...but yes, you could say I’m fairly well-versed in it. One of my other talents.”

“Has it been useful?”

“The facility with languages? Certainly.”

Arthur shut up, then, impressed.

///

There’s a knock on the door, and a familiar voice, and Arthur slaps the covers most of the way off.

Eames walks in with a large paper bag and three perfect long-stemmed roses.

His smile turns vaguely predatory and mostly amused when he sees Arthur still looking at the mirror, at the writing on his skin. “Like it, then?”

“How do you feel about me getting it done permanently?” Arthur says. “Sort of as an anniversary present.”

Arthur smiles languidly as Eames goes to sit on the bed, watches Eames’s hands as they idly, firmly trace over his bare feet.

“Hell of a commitment, but yes, I’d be quite flattered,” Eames says after a moment. “You sure you want it there?”

“My suits will hide it,” Arthur says, and finally drops the mirror over the edge of the bed, crawls closer so he’s settled over Eames’s lap. “Anywhere else it should go?”

“Your arse?”

“Sure, but you won’t be able to touch me for at least a week.”

He laughs when Eames hastily backtracks. “Oh, fuck, not that then.” Pause, and Arthur lets himself enjoy it as Eames moves closer to him, the better to let those eyes track over his skin, the places where he’s still just barely modest, where the sheets are crumpled over him. Hiding the scars, the tiny markings here and there on his body: the crudely tattooed dog tags on his right shoulder blade. The long-faded scars and burns trailing down from his left hip nearly to his knee. The tattoo of the lily on his left ankle, his memorial to Mal.

“How about here,” and Eames’s voice has dropped into the dangerously deep register that Arthur knows so well. He’s heard it everywhere: in the dreams, during getaways. And more and more, he hears this voice during the frantic nights when they can’t always wait for bare skin, when there’s nothing for it but need and heat, when Arthur can’t take another breath without Eames by his side.

He looks over his shoulder, and Eames is tracing a hand over the pucker in his left shoulder blade, remnant of an in-and-out bullet wound, thankfully missing all the nerves and major blood vessels.

“In a circle, maybe?” Arthur says, and he’s deliberately keeping his voice light. “Or would you prefer two lines?”

The only response he gets is Eames placing a kiss right over where the scar used to be; long since faded, though he remembers vividly where the bullet had gone in. Arthur moans, and he rolls away to Eames’s protests – which are quickly silenced when he takes over the kiss.

And Eames is pliant under his hands, and Arthur growls once, low in his throat, and rips the other man’s shirt off. “Up,” Arthur says and nips savagely at Eames’s plush mouth, and he’s steering them off the bed, he’s kicking the sheets off and walking Eames into the en suite bathroom.

It only takes a few seconds for Eames to lose the rest of his clothes, and he goes willingly as Arthur pushes him into the shower – but as soon as the water starts up he frowns and runs a gentle finger over the ink on Arthur’s collarbone. “Seems a shame to wash away all that. Hard to keep you pinned down, even when you’re sleeping.”

“Hence the idea for the tat,” Arthur says easily, and he drops to his knees. Hands on Eames’s hips, turning him around slowly, and he sinks his teeth into Eames’s skin again and again, leaving bites from navel to ass.

“I can actually live with that,” Eames says, shaky now, and Arthur smiles around another mouthful of Eames’s skin, bites down a little more gently – before releasing him and nosing up around his balls, running his hand and tongue over the half-hard planes of Eames’s cock. He can literally feel the blood rushing under his fingertips.

Eames groans and Arthur looks up.

Eames’s eyes are little more than a stormy-gray rim around completely blown pupils. He’s breathing hard through his mouth. His tongue flicking out to lick at the streams of water pouring down on them. Hot red flush of his chest and his neck.

Arthur smiles and takes him in hand, plays with the foreskin and pulls it back just enough to expose the head of Eames’s cock, and licks, once.

 _“Arthur,”_ Eames says, once, and then Arthur has mercy on him, swallows him down easily.

He lets his free hand move around the scarred ridge of Eames’s hip, around to his ass – and he hears Eames suck in a deep, shaky breath as he circles him with his fingertips, the rough pads catching on the sensitive pucker. He just barely pushes in and Eames throws his head back and groans, those huge hands clenching almost painfully on his shoulders.

Arthur smiles, hums as he deep-throats Eames – and he sinks his fingers into him one after the other, feels Eames stretch and give around him. He feels more than hears Eames’s desperate sounds, the echoes building in the limited space of the shower.

Arthur licks Eames’s cock again before pulling off, the wet head popping out from his lips – and Eames chokes back a harsh cry.

“Come for me,” Arthur says, simply, and he crooks his fingers and – yes, _there_ – and Eames shouts, once, and comes hard, all over Arthur’s upturned face, mixing with the ink already trickling darkly down his skin as the water washes it off.

And Arthur takes himself in hand and jacks off to the sight of Eames completely wrecked and shaking, just barely able to hold himself up in the shower.

///

Arthur lets Eames book the tattoo appointments, and he finds them a master who does tengwar as easily as she does tribal designs.

They leave her shop entirely satisfied with her detailed, graceful work. Arthur’s shoulder blade proclaiming _A tíro nin, Fanuilos!_ A matching inscription on Eames’s skin, over his hip bone: _Aníron_.  



End file.
